By Jan Willis — 2014
“If one of us cannot breathe, none of us can breathe,” writes Buddhist scholar Jan Willis in this poignant essay.
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CLEAR ALL
The 27-minute speech was one of many scathing post–civil rights movement critiques Baldwin delivered throughout the country about the treatment of Black people in America.
Negroes have always held, the lowest jobs, the most menial jobs, which are now being destroyed by automation. No remote provision has yet been made to absorb this labor surplus.
In each generation we have to experience the haunting ritual of a Black family grieving in public over the loss of a loved one at the hands of the police.
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As both James Baldwin and Martin Luther King, Jr., insisted, America is an identity that white people will protect at any cost, and the country’s history—its founding documents, its national heroes—is the supporting argument that underpins that identity.